Sardinia!

Several weekends ago, my wife and I thought it'd be a great idea to go to "Boulevardia," a two day outdoor music and beer festival (two of my favorite things wrapped together in one big package meant especially for me!) in downtown, Kansas City. With 70 musical acts on tap, I thought what could possibly be the downside?

Well... A) I'm not as young or fit as I used to be; and B) the weather! Oh, my God, the weather!

Leading up to the event, I kept my eye on the weather, tracking the long-term forecast with intense scrutiny. What I'd been on the lookout for was rain, tornadoes, the usual fun stuff of the Midwest, only maxed out by global warming. Things looked good! 85 degrees as the high for both days, no rain in sight. And then...the forecast heat kept inching up, bit by bit, day by day. Until it hit 101 degrees on Saturday. With the humidity really, really high as well.

Crap.

Alright. I pulled up my big boy britches and prepared. I imagined a musical montage (cue the theme to "Rocky"), while I tried on all of my old shorts, stashed at the bottom of a drawer beneath our bed. (Of course, I think we'd want to cut the part out of the montage where none of my shorts fit and I had to make a mad dash to Target for new ones. Hey, don't blame my weight gain! It's the damned humidity  making all of my clothes shrink.) 

So, armed with shorts, a hat, water bottles, sun screen and other life essentials (we looked like Hawaiian be-shirted campers), we headed for day one of Boulevardia. Day one wasn't bad. It started at 5:00 p.m., so most of the blistering sun had fallen and there was a nice breeze. But by the end of the night, when headliner Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats (one of the main reasons for our attendance) took the main stage, we found ourselves in the middle of a huge, jam-packed mob situation. Hundreds and hundreds and thousands and hundreds of fans were squished together like sardines in a can.

While Rateliff was awesome, several things impeded my enjoyment: 1) I was sweating like a stuck pig and feeling claustrophobic; 2) the ever present threat of Covid (this was our big "coming out" party; we had forgone masks completely for the first time in a while); and 3) I kept thinking "wouldn't this be an ideal place for a mass shooting?" 

Which is sad, really, that that's what was going through my mind. I kept imagining ways to smuggle a gun into the event, which wouldn't have been tough at all, instead of just letting go and enjoying the concert. A very depressing current state of affairs in which we live.

But it wasn't all bad. Where else could you see "Saxsquatch," some guy who puts on a Bigfoot costume and plays the saxophone, covering a lotta maudlin hits of the '70's and '80's? (How in the world he managed not to pass out in that heat, in that costume, was beyond me. Unless...could it be? Naw. But, wait...maybe, just maybe...he was a REAL BIGFOOT!)

We survived the first day, no great shakes. But day two was an entirely different affair. It started out hot at 11:00 A.M. and just got blazingly worse. In my youth, my friends and I went to these festivals non-stop and the heat and humidity never bothered us. Here, it was a case of survival where we constantly sought out shade. We grew clever and pulled chairs into little rock islands with tree coverage. I wet down a wash cloth and put it on top of my head beneath my hat, no matter how dumb I looked. We ended up at various musical stages, at this point dictated by the amount of shade coverage offered.

When my wife moved onto the Maker's alley, I was near collapse. Like an old fat man, I found a tree and plopped down beneath it,  chigger bites preferable over heat stroke.

All around me young people laughed, gathered, drank, stood out in the sunshine. You know, being annoying. Young people suck! Get offa my lawn!

Once my wife returned, I told her I'd had enough. In small increments, we made our way out of there, stopping beneath trees, finding abandoned seats, naturally pausing for beer, until we finally landed in God-made, natural air conditioning.

The moral of the story? Just wait until you get old, damn whippersnapper!

Hey, now, don't open the doors to the ol' folks home for me quite yet, but floundering stand-up comedian Charlie Broadmoor is beginning to feel the weight of his mortality weighing on him. Things don't get any better when he inadvertently heckles a demon during one of his nightclub gigs. Now, he really feels that ol' life time clock ticking. Read the Amazing True Story in my book, Demon with a Comb-Over, available right here, right now!